It happens like that. Slow baked, sudden bubbling, no cauldron, face up in the vortex. You become days of mourning. A pall, a viscous grayish veil. You can no longer see clearly or purely. Vision pales, angel eyes gone. You are here upon this earth, lost, and that which has been interpreted and internalized as scarry pulp and Grand Guignol with no intermission has taken its toll. There is only so much you can take, so much the body, heart and mind can absorb, tours of hell end in hell you tell yourself, or hear it told, while toxins accumulate. How to detoxify? It seems life has become a cyclical purge, always purging, always shedding, and beneath it all the pall. You are days of mourning.

It is grieving. It is grief on all fours. Grief on all sixes. All eights. Bark bark at the moon. Why not? The moon won’t bark back. The moon is glacial, neutral, sovereign. The moon does not exist for you. It is not your goddess in waiting, not an apogee for refugees or orphanage for waylaid vagrants. Then again the moon becomes the firmament church ice and blue for those who are days of mourning, so who knows what secret mercies the moon may bestow upon the needy and grieving barking wildly in the dark.

Days of mourning become days of mourning because weeks of mourning months of mourning years of mourning. Moths flutter around the lighted graves of the living. Open your mouth wider, wider still, and if a moth flies out (or in), kneel upon the earth as if worlds depended on it.